McCain, Levin renew base-closing fight

Despite suffering a resounding defeat on the military base closing issue in committee, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., plan to offer an amendment to the defense authorization bill on the Senate floor today that would launch one more round of the Base Realignment and Closure process in 2001.

McCain and Levin's original proposal called for two more rounds of the controversial process. After that was rejected two weeks ago by the Armed Services Committee, the two senators proposed conducting just one more round, but that too was voted down.

Other than the provision scaling back the process to a single round, the proposal that McCain and Levin will offer on the floor mirrors the plan they offered in committee, according to sources.

The Clinton administration also weighed in on the base closing debate Monday in a Statement of Administration Policy from the OMB, saying additional base closing efforts are "critical to secure funds for readiness, modernization, and quality of life programs."

The administration also faulted Senate Republicans for adding $8 billion to the president's $280.8 billion request for the Pentagon.

The McCain-Levin proposal attempts to assuage criticism of earlier BRAC rounds by requiring the Defense secretary to consider local concerns early in the process, and restricting the use of "privatization in place", a process President Clinton deployed in 1995 in an effort to preserve two bases in California and Texas.

That move was widely regarded as a politicization of the BRAC process, which establishes an independent commission to select bases for shutdown and submits the list to Congress for an up-or- down vote.

Critics of conducting another round point to the 1995 experience as evidence that the process has been discredited.

But McCain and Levin argue that they have postponed the appointment of a new BRAC panel until May 2001, indicating that Clinton would have no responsibility for the next round.

Supporters claim savings from the previous BRAC rounds will total $25 billion by 2003.

Earlier this year, McCain and Levin circulated a Dear Colleague letter saying that "[m]ilitary infrastructure still has 23 percent excess capacity that costs $3.4 billion per year," indicating the potential for substantial additional savings in coming years.